I have an English Lit degree, and the following advice from a professor almost made it worthwhile: "if you're reading for pleasure, and it's not pleasurable, put the book down. Give the author 50 pages, and if they haven't made it worth your time, move on to the next book."
I share this advice with everybody, but almost nobody takes it as far as I know. There's way too much guilt and shame surrounding reading: "if I pick it up, by GOD I will finish it, even if it takes a year and I hate every second of it". It shouldn't be that way.
Two of my favorite books - God Emperor of Dune and Anathem - did not hook me until 2-300 pages. I don’t like this advice as it would make me miss these amazing books.
The challenge with the advice is that is I want ok experiences, it works. But if I’m looking for amazing experiences it cuts them off. Lots of art is difficult until the switch that makes it worthwhile. If I followed the advice to only meet my immediate, hedonistic needs to be happy then I wouldn’t have as much overall happiness.
Especially since one great book may be as enjoyable as 100 marginal books.
Of course, it’s also important to try to figure out how to avoid all the other terrible books that just never get better.
> I don’t like this advice as it would make me miss these amazing books.
Abandoning a book does not mean you can never pick it up again. I have abandoned media that I didn’t like only to return to it years later and enjoy it.
> The challenge with the advice is that is I want ok experiences, it works. But if I’m looking for amazing experiences it cuts them off.
That would only be true if all amazing experiences sucked at the start, which is absolutely not true.
> Lots of art is difficult until the switch that makes it worthwhile.
And lots of it is worth it all the way through, or has something that makes you believe it will deliver if you stick with it.
> Especially since one great book may be as enjoyable as 100 marginal books.
And because our time is finite, if we abandon those 100 we may have the opportunity to find 5 great books instead of 1.
Don't you think you're being a little uncharitable to the advice?
The experience between struggling with a complex work that you feel has something to tell you vs. being disappointed by low-quality schlock isn't hard to differentiate. Telling people to 'just power through it no matter what' results in a lot of wasted time, and potentially worse, a diminished joy in reading itself.
I feel this way about Dune Messiah, except I didn't appreciate it until after Children of Dune. Dune is one of my favorite books, if not my favorite. Dune Messiah is a *frustrating* read right after Dune. It's not until you see the whole story of the first three books as one narrative arc that it becomes enjoyable.
This is good advice. Similarly, if you're reading a book for the information, and you find it's way too wordy, there's no shame in just skimming it.
I used to feel like it was my duty to read every word written by an author if I was serious about reading, even for self-help or pop-psych books. Over time, I realized that there's really a lot of bad writing out there, but there's still good nuggets of info if you look. The trick is to just recognize when a book is just padding itself out and just skim through the boring bits. No shame in that. And honestly, so many self-help or productivity books are just padded out to justify selling a book.
Agree with this. Once a self-help author publishes the second or third book, it’s time to consider what more can they offer. Didn’t their first book solve everything? Or are they just doing it for the money.
Many people wouldn't get far into the great works of literature with this approach. Many worthwhile books are "difficult pleasures" but the pleasure might not come until after experiencing a lot of pain. Things that are worth doing aren't always fun but you get through the displeasure to become a different person -- one who has access to pleasures you may not have realized you could experience. I didn't like beer when I first tried it. I kept trying it and now I know why beer is beloved by so many.
Many worthwhile books are difficult, true, but many are not. You'll never read all of either group. This advice is saying: don't waste time on books you're not getting anything out of, if it means missing out on books you would get something out of.
In general this is good advice, but needs a heuristic of when to apply it. It's a bit like albums: some are hard to get into but worth the effort in the end.
So while there are plenty of books I won't finish, I tend to stick with things if:
a) I've worked my way through a previous book by the author and it was worthwhile
b) People whose opinions I trust say it's hard but worthwhile
My spouse and I have a “10 minute” rule for movies or streaming video series. If either of us makes a thumbs down motion in the first 10 minutes we just stop and find something else to watch.
Sunk cost fallacy is playing its part as well I think. I can’t bring myself to read anything I don’t like anymore. I’m a slow reader so working through a book takes its time and I want to get the best possible experience out of it. Won’t happen if I don’t like the book. It’s not only valid for books but everything else: series, movies, video games. If it doesn’t work, why push it?
Some of it also comes from prior impressions that a book is "worth reading". Take Wealth of Nations as an example. It inspired, arguably, the whole field of economics - and yet after a hundred or so pages of reading about the worth of the labour of a man in Glasgow as compared to the labour of a man in London, I just wanted someone to end my misery.
Alas, I'm afflicted by the "must finish" disease, so I paused reading and keep telling myself I'll get back to it.
Do you know how many attempts it took me to finally read Catch 22?
I must've read the first chapter a dozen times. I kept putting it down because it just wasn't holding my interest. Then one day it did and I read it straight through.
One of my favorite books till this day.
BTW, I have no compunction about reading the last few pages of a book first. If it seems like a terrible ending I don't bother. Otherwise, by the time I read it I'll likely have forgotten how it ends. I'd never do this with a movie, but it has yet to spoil a book for me.
This is generally my approach, not just with books but with TV shows and movies as well. Unless there's a compelling reason for me to forge on, I give something a chance and then abort early if it doesn't show a promising yield.
I also take a version of this with informational books. I read until I feel I got what I needed out of the book, and then don't feel pressure to read on if what's left isn't of interest or need.
I've been saying I'm "in the middle of 7 books right now" for almost a year now because I can't let myself admit I'm done reading them :(
I think the biggest difficulty of letting go is that I know if I _wasn't_ so busy I really would like to finish all of them. It's harder to let go when it's external pressures keeping you from finding the time rather than your own motivation/interest
I’m not a literature expert and I know people generally like the book. But I got maybe half way through the book and was wondering, “okay so when is the plot going to advance? Is there even a plot? Just feels like stuff is happening but I’m not sure why I should care.”
I spent too long thinking that it must be a good book so maybe I just have to give it a few more chapters.
Snow Crash is way uneven. I believe the first chapter was actually storyboarded, to be a comic book. So it makes an amazing hook, but the rest of the book Needs An Editor.
It reads as almost a picaresque satire, like Candide. It's full of good jokes like "I'm sure he'll listen to Reason" and "the most important technology man has created is the three ring binder", and uses the adventure structure to make commentary about his particular dystopia.
Buuuuut, its also laced with random boring history lessons on ancient mesopotamia. There are just too many locations, characters and digressions to move the plot up coherently and keep in your head, and the flipping between protagonists is hard to follow and remember. Wikipedia's plot summary doesn't even mention several key points, like a nuclear fission powered guard dog nearly going critical. Some the jokes are dated references to the 1980's (Godfather's pizza, Moonies).
There is a good book in there, but wait for the miniseries in 2050.
A piece of art can simply not be your thing, but still be "good". That people whose taste you respect think something is great is reason to give it a shot -- but if you're not into it, you're not into it.
That's not wrong at all. It's just differing tastes. It doesn't mean that the work isn't good, nor does it mean that your taste is flawed.
It's good advice for multiple reasons. I put books down using this rule for many years. Sometimes I pick it up again and absolutely love it but I'm at a different point in my life and intellectual interests. It's kind of like mushrooms - when I was a kid I hated them, now I want them on everything.
Absolutely. "I must finish everything on my plate" mentality is unnecessary masochism. I recall plowing through ~2/3 of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and then losing interest. I picked up "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" today to be my new bathroom reader.
The first time i picked up Infinite Jest it was a drag for 200 pages and I dropped it.
Tried it second time. Went through those terrible 200 first pages... and suddenly I was on the 900th wishing hard it wasn't about to end. One of favourite books to this day.
I'm general, this is an online problem: how long do you want to persevere on any given book if it's not immediately gratifying? I often take into consideration whether I enjoyed other author's works and friends suggestions.
I think it's not so good advice. I have read many books which took me many, many attempts to get to the point of no return to love them and finish them, most of those books are now my favorites. The consumerist approach of giving 50 pages would be better suited for red flags, for example, if it's a theme you don't like, or maybe, just maybe, something against your personal beliefs and values. Life is too short to not give a chance to literature masterpieces.
I think good advice is something along the lines of: "Find a good book discussion group" (for me this is /r/Fantasy). "Then, if you aren't liking a book somewhat significantly into it, explain to people there why you don't like it and should you keep reading it."
This method is pretty effective in a good discussion group because if you have explained your reasons well, people will understand your reasons for dislike and know whether things change; the payoff is worth it; the author improves; etc.
One example is The Licanius Trilogy. A lot of people say, "I read book 1, I hate it, should I finish it" and depending on how much they hated book 1 and their reading speed people will give differing advice. For example if you can finish the trilogy in 5 days (this is about how fast I read it) I would say yes, the ending is fantastic but the books are pretty dreadful in terms of prose quality and character depth. However if this will take you 6 months, no, bail out now and spend your time better. Read a plot summary on Wikipedia.
Reading is very much a social activity and much better when treated as such imo.
Whatever heuristic you want to use is fine, the key thing is that if it fails your test, you have to be willing to put it down and move on to the next book. Don't get caught up on 50 pages, it's an arbitrary number.
For me, it's somewhat about thinking "I am not good at finishing things". I want to be someone who "gets things done", when I should actually strive to be someone who "quickly lets go of what is not worth spending time on".
I don't agree with this. Many times, I struggled with a book but "forced" myself to finish it, to find it beneficial in the end and resulting in a substantial change in my views.
I’m the developer of an iOS and iPadOS app that I think is relevant here. My app Ephemera is a simple read-later application that places expiration dates on every link you add. If you don’t read the article in time, it disappears forever.
The app isn’t for everyone, but if you are buried under the torrent of information you “think” you should read, I have found that Ephemera helps me focus and actually read more.
I actually solved this without an app. I realized I had around 10k "read later" items in my bookmarks folder in Chrome, and I simply deleted all of them.
I solved this by forcing myself to read my list in chronological order. After a small period it became very obvious that most stuff I'd put in my list truly did not matter.
Awesome! I do this with my YouTube Watch Later playlist and it really works. I'll get a couple hundred videos I "definitely want to watch, but not now" and my script will clear them out after X time. Never once have I missed something it's deleted. I don't even know _what_ it's deleted, because if it stood out enough to remember the name and search it up again I'll probably just watch it. Very few things do.
* Somehow, App Store SEO can't find it with "ephemera". "ephemera deadpan" found it though
* For me, personally, bookmarking is usually done on the computer and read elsewhere. Phone-only is restrictive
* Not a fan of paid unlock for basic features (setting expiration dates, accessing my own history (?!?)). I almost understand notifications if server costs are involved, like Apollo, but. While I understand devs gotta make a buck and this is both popular and well within your rights, I am not a fan of this trend
Nice idea. I use Readwise in the river/shortlist mode and have a similar filter (not in shortlist, saved > x days ago), but I have to manually clear it out.
Is there a way to have unread items go in an archive instead of disappearing? Sometimes I find insightful to re-look at the titles of things I've saved, even if I don't read them. It brings me back the why I saved it and it always unlocks some thought.
I'd love something similar with more general aspect, just TODO list with different priorities, expiration etc. Whether the content is URL, name of the book or grocery list are just implementation details.
Love the idea. I use Signal's Note to Self feature with a 4 week timer. Anything that warrants an extension gets readded to the queue. A dedicated app with a custom expiration / reminders / notifications / cross-device syncing would be phenomenal!
I had this problem but with videogames. What I ended up doing was making a giant spreadsheet in Airtable with every game I've ever played and ever want to play. I have a nice little "What To Play Next" grid of images that I'm constantly tinkering with the order of as my fancy gravitates towards one genre or another. E.g. If I finish a long JRPG I'll probably filter on games of a shorter length or a Shooter for a palette cleanse and move that higher up in the list.
The important parts for me were:
* Don't assume you'll play everything or stress about "missing" games
* Easy visibility into what I'm currently playing, what I liked in the past, and what I've been thinking about playing next
* Try not to play more than 2 games concurrently. Then I end up never finishing anything, I appreciate the games I play less, and then I have less fun playing games overall.
Bonus points with this approach: Since I always have something I'm excited to play next, I'm never in a rush to buy games new. I actually save a fair amount of money because I'm almost always playing games a couple years old and on sale for 50%+ off.
This approach has been so successful and enjoyable for me I even thought about spinning this off into a product online but figured my weird OCD approach maybe isn't that generally applicable to other. Plus you can just create your own Airtable tailored to your own needs.
Most of the columns are self-explanatory. IGDB = is a games database run by Twitch (https://www.igdb.com/). I use the ID as basically a foreign key to their table and then I have scripts that query stuff in there like their critic's rating and release date programmatically.
Also if anyone knows of any other public data sets of video games and video game metadata please let me know!
I made a drastic improvement in my mindset with regards to media backlogs when I realized that they they exist to entertain me and that my whims are the only thing that matters. I don’t owe that pile of books anything. Now they’re not allowed to generate stress, only entertainment!
I think people feel forced to get the value they put in back out of every single one of them asap as to not feel like they wasted their money which is what is causing that stress to begin with, even though there really isn't any reason for that urge if you look at it. The backlog is going to be there practically forever, just waiting - granted it's not tied to a service which might shut down at any moment.
I also try not to play more than a handful of games at a time. The paradox of choice is real.
I tend to play older games, and games I can pick up and play for five minutes at a time. Think Game Boy. A level here and a level there can feel like you've achieved way more than some longer, more grindy games.
I keep a couple of lists of games.
A massive "sounds interesting" list of games that I hear about along the way. I may never play some of them, but it sounded good at the time. Title and system is about all I put here. If I come back and don't remember what it was, it probably wasn't as interesting as I thought.
The other is list with WIP, started, and finished games.
If something slides into the started pile and I forget where I was, I just remove it. Life is too short to worry about things that are supposed to be fun.
> I also try not to play more than a handful of games at a time. The paradox of choice is real.
In general I'm like this, but I also have games that are exclusions to the rule that I pop back around to from time to time, like the save I have in Factorio that I come back to and tinker with now and then (I keep a text file around with my general to-do list so I don't spend an hour running around the base trying to remember what the hell I was doing, while marveling at various bits of kludged together spaghetti)
As for books, I'm generally working through at least 3 at a time: One on audible, for commutes, one on my kindle, and one in print. I try to keep the kindle/print books varied so I switch between whichever strikes my fancy at the moment.
I've got the same issue, particularly with PlayStation Plus, where there are countless games available at minimal cost.
My previous strategy was to begin a game, that would be my main game, while sampling others on the side. If one of the side games caught my interest more, it would take the main game's place, and I might return to the original game later.
This approach was low-pressure, but it often took me years to complete many games.
I used to handle my side projects similarly, starting numerous projects but rarely bringing them to completion. Lately, I've been making an effort to stick with a side project long enough to at least show it to friends.
Now, I'm pushing myself to stay committed to two games at a time. One game is from top of my list that I really want to play. The other is a shorter one. This way I can enjoy that satisfying feeling of accomplishment more frequently.
I'd never considered making a spreadsheet for this, but now I'm intrigued by the idea!
> I used to handle my side projects similarly, starting numerous projects but rarely bringing them to completion. Lately, I've been making an effort to stick with a side project long enough to at least show it to friends.
I've been following the same approach, but also noticed that it's less effective at utilizing my excitement. Every project hits the point where sooner tedious work must be done and I've found myself sometimes stay away from it for a few weeks and not pick up something I'm excited about because I should really work on the tedious thing, so I work on neither.
Ha, are you me? I've got an extremely similar setup.
I used Airtable to solve 3 problems:
1. With so many free games (Epic, GoG, PS+, Gamepass, etc), it's hard to know if/where I own a game
2. With so many owned games, it's hard to pick a thing to play.
3. Keeping track of what games I've played and how I felt about them. I do a big writeup of "my best media of the year" and it's hard to keep track of what I play.
Data wise, I also center everything on the IGDB ID, which gives me a lot of basic metadata. I also store Steam ID if available, because that's a more common foreign key. I've got a custom React extension that handles adding and fetching data. I've got tables for Games, Purchases, and Playthroughs, plus support for replay reasons and genre selection.
I recently did a big migration to add HLTB data, which I sure __thought__ was going to be simple and ended up being a big pain. I'm going to do a writeup for it once I find the time, because it did end up being interesting.
In terms of existing data, I found https://github.com/leinstay/steamdb very useful for collating information (though I had to shrink it a bit with `jq`- those are some pretty hefty JSON documents.
I totally agree this is overkill for most people, but I've also found it super successful for increasing my enjoyment of videogames in an odd way. A bit part of that recently was recategorizing games from a 1-4 scale of interest level to a more human scale of "Play Next", "Play Soon", "Want to Play", "Play Eventually", "Would Like to Play", and "Won't Play". This lets me functionally hide games that I really don't intend to play (especially ones I just added to accounts for free). Narrowing my "Play Next" list down to about 15 games and restricting "Now Playing" to ~ 1 / platform __greatly__ reduces the cognitive overhead of a "backlog" and turns them into "a fun buffet of things I can do".
It hasn't been updated in a while but I have used this games list before. (https://github.com/Elbriga14/EveryVideoGameEver)
IGDB sounds incredible though, thanks for sharing.
I'm curious if you use How Long to Beat to get the completion time. I've used completion time to produce some helpful metrics.
Yes I use How Long To Beat! I was amazed to see it’s so popular it’s even integrated into IGN’s page for games.
And wow storing them all as JSON that’s cool. I wish there was something with as much data as IGDB but you could download and access as easily as JSON files. Their API is really good but obviously has rate limits, etc.
A strength of a product, particularly where emotion and motivation are concerned, is guidance and encouragement - making it easy to do. Even if you "could" do it without help.
Most people aren't autodidacts... even elite atheletes have coaches.
That was an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”.
I used to worry about adding items to my “want to read” list faster than I could read them. I realized that this is preferable to the opposite - having nothing to read. As long as I’m alive and want to read, I’ll be reading something. Having read all the books I want to is not my objective; enjoying reading books is. So, no need to worry about not having enough time to read all I want to.
I now treat my list as a pre-filtered pool of books that span various topics. There is no prioritization associated with them. I find it best to read next whichever book seems most relevant to my interests at the time, which I can’t anticipate in advance.
The other day my girlfriend sent me an article about microscopic gears in the legs of an insect and so I decided to read a book off my list about intelligent design. My prior read was about cardiovascular disease because I read an article about cholesterol on the internet. The one prior to that was about gender disparities, simply because I felt like it fit my frame of mind at the time.
There is no need to make the matter complicated: read what you want to read, when you want to read it.
> an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”.
But it needs to be said and repeated, right?
Because people feel time-poor when it comes to matching what they want to do against what they can do. Building up a backlog is probably the worst way to kill the fun there.
And if everyone in that scenario feels like they are somewhat alone in that feeling where the "Books I wish I had time to read" turns into a prioritization exercise where you end up reading the "most important book" while thinking of a book you aren't.
You and the OP are saying the same thing, but it is worth repeating.
The longer you've been out of a structured learning environment like a school/college the more sense that makes because that is a constrained environment where optimization actually helps & the fun reading part isn't.
As for me, my library holds list is a good way to have a "river of books" where I can dip out of it and let it pass through my bookshelf on a schedule whether I read it or not.
People are making trivial things unnecessarily complicated.
Unless and until you have a specific objective (eg. prepare/need for a job, go through a course etc.) all reading is cursory i.e. people are natural born dilettantes and flaneurs.
You the reader should only read the second last paragraph, which I copied here for your convenience:
To return to information overload: this means treating your "to read" pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don't feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren't an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.
I asked GPT4 to summarize the article's most important information into bullet points, which I find more useful than one paragraph summaries:
> 1) The initial belief that technology would help filter out irrelevant information and prevent overload has not come to fruition; instead, people are overwhelmed by content they genuinely want to read.
> 2) The problem lies in the fact that our filters are too successful, causing us to face a daily influx of interesting content (referred to as "haystack-sized piles of needles").
> 3) Many aspects of life also involve "too many needles," where we struggle to allocate our limited time and attention to numerous important tasks or interests.
> 4) Conventional productivity advice, which emphasizes efficiency, organization, and prioritization, falls short in addressing the challenge of having too many significant priorities.
> 5) The proposed solution is to treat the to-read pile as a river, selectively choosing items to engage with while accepting the inherent impossibility of clearing the entire backlog, thus leading to a more liberating and realistic approach to information overload.
The downside of doing the above is it's more generic and loses the punch of the prose. Always the main issue with skipping the reading to get to the meat. Obviously easier for non-fiction than fiction.
Eliminate the waste in your 'to read' pile by populating it the same way he suggests selecting from it - pluck a few choice items here and there from the river that is the British Library.
I understand what you’re trying to do with this comment, but arguably the river in this case is HN.
The paragraph you mention is the tangible advice, but articulating the problem is in my mind even more important than the advice itself.
Advice is just advice. Maybe it applies to you, maybe it doesn’t. The problem is what remains. The problem if well articulated either validates the advice, or gives the reader information to process for themselves and from which personal insight can be reached.
The advice without the problem is just some guy on the Internet telling you what to do, and that, to me, is rather uninteresting.
I think many people are struggling with the same issues independently, all across society. This is equally true right now as it is in other times.
Perhaps there are many who have identified the problem without settling on a satisfying solution. In these cases the context is already (painfully) familiar and the main insight will be the path forward out of their malaise.
What you say is true for those who have never even grappled with the question, but I assume HN harbors folks who like to analyze inefficiencies in their lives, so I'd expect most of those here who already have reading lists to have contended with this problem and at least attempted to search for solutions in the past.
Never heard of this person before but was pleasantly surprised by the content.
In my own life, I have spent decades plagued by the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough, and I had many varied areas of focus and felt like I didn’t really progress on anything. That in itself (the feeling of lack of progress) was I think kind of misleading, as I did progress on some things (though I clearly regressed on some things as well).
I don’t really know how it happened but I have made some significant shifts in my life. I started to become physically active again, I stopped smoking cigarettes and some other unhealthy habits, I started really developing and digging into some of my active and creative passions like writing, playing a musical instrument, and renewing my focus on coding to an end and with purpose and quality in mind.
Somehow I started finding that I had much more energy and time available for everything. And as opportunities arose I began to seize them. It was a very exciting period for me. Eventually, my plate really became too full, and things began to suffer (mostly me) and I started to say no to things, and continue to keep my focus on what I really think is important. I feel that it has taught me about the interconnected nature of my life, and about how to value my time, how to slow down and appreciate something, how to deal with my emotions head on instead of taking years or decades to process events in my life (I am sure there have and will be many exceptions to what I have said), how to actively take stock of my current situation and change my plans as needed, how to deal with the fact that my expectations for things very rarely match up with reality, how to stop being an intellectual purist and idealist while still deeply valuing a good idea and pursuing my ideals. I look back at how much I have accomplished the last year and I can’t help thinking everything came from stopping trying to do everything and accomplishing nothing (or so it felt), and by embracing what really mattered to me when it was in front of me. I learned to float down the river, I guess. Lazily most of the time. But when I feel it is necessary, I can exert more power in changing my trajectory than ever I could before.
His books are enjoyable, I'd recommend his most recent one "Four thousand weeks" and the previous one "The Antidote" as well. Especially if you're overwhelmed or gets hit with anxiety often.
I think most people end up doing what he's suggesting anyway, out of necessity. I suppose his key insight is to just stop feeling guilty about not being able to get through it all.
Readit News
I share this advice with everybody, but almost nobody takes it as far as I know. There's way too much guilt and shame surrounding reading: "if I pick it up, by GOD I will finish it, even if it takes a year and I hate every second of it". It shouldn't be that way.
The challenge with the advice is that is I want ok experiences, it works. But if I’m looking for amazing experiences it cuts them off. Lots of art is difficult until the switch that makes it worthwhile. If I followed the advice to only meet my immediate, hedonistic needs to be happy then I wouldn’t have as much overall happiness.
Especially since one great book may be as enjoyable as 100 marginal books.
Of course, it’s also important to try to figure out how to avoid all the other terrible books that just never get better.
Abandoning a book does not mean you can never pick it up again. I have abandoned media that I didn’t like only to return to it years later and enjoy it.
> The challenge with the advice is that is I want ok experiences, it works. But if I’m looking for amazing experiences it cuts them off.
That would only be true if all amazing experiences sucked at the start, which is absolutely not true.
> Lots of art is difficult until the switch that makes it worthwhile.
And lots of it is worth it all the way through, or has something that makes you believe it will deliver if you stick with it.
> Especially since one great book may be as enjoyable as 100 marginal books.
And because our time is finite, if we abandon those 100 we may have the opportunity to find 5 great books instead of 1.
The experience between struggling with a complex work that you feel has something to tell you vs. being disappointed by low-quality schlock isn't hard to differentiate. Telling people to 'just power through it no matter what' results in a lot of wasted time, and potentially worse, a diminished joy in reading itself.
I feel this way about Dune Messiah, except I didn't appreciate it until after Children of Dune. Dune is one of my favorite books, if not my favorite. Dune Messiah is a *frustrating* read right after Dune. It's not until you see the whole story of the first three books as one narrative arc that it becomes enjoyable.
Now I don't feel guilty about:
- books I don't finish
- movies or tv series I don't finish
- projects I don't make into a company
and it doesn't matter if I bought into it hard. If I bought the "tv series complete collection", or whatever:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect
I used to feel like it was my duty to read every word written by an author if I was serious about reading, even for self-help or pop-psych books. Over time, I realized that there's really a lot of bad writing out there, but there's still good nuggets of info if you look. The trick is to just recognize when a book is just padding itself out and just skim through the boring bits. No shame in that. And honestly, so many self-help or productivity books are just padded out to justify selling a book.
― Alexander Hamilton
So while there are plenty of books I won't finish, I tend to stick with things if:
a) I've worked my way through a previous book by the author and it was worthwhile b) People whose opinions I trust say it's hard but worthwhile
And there’s always something better.
Alas, I'm afflicted by the "must finish" disease, so I paused reading and keep telling myself I'll get back to it.
I must've read the first chapter a dozen times. I kept putting it down because it just wasn't holding my interest. Then one day it did and I read it straight through.
One of my favorite books till this day.
BTW, I have no compunction about reading the last few pages of a book first. If it seems like a terrible ending I don't bother. Otherwise, by the time I read it I'll likely have forgotten how it ends. I'd never do this with a movie, but it has yet to spoil a book for me.
I also take a version of this with informational books. I read until I feel I got what I needed out of the book, and then don't feel pressure to read on if what's left isn't of interest or need.
I think the biggest difficulty of letting go is that I know if I _wasn't_ so busy I really would like to finish all of them. It's harder to let go when it's external pressures keeping you from finding the time rather than your own motivation/interest
I’m not a literature expert and I know people generally like the book. But I got maybe half way through the book and was wondering, “okay so when is the plot going to advance? Is there even a plot? Just feels like stuff is happening but I’m not sure why I should care.”
I spent too long thinking that it must be a good book so maybe I just have to give it a few more chapters.
It reads as almost a picaresque satire, like Candide. It's full of good jokes like "I'm sure he'll listen to Reason" and "the most important technology man has created is the three ring binder", and uses the adventure structure to make commentary about his particular dystopia.
Buuuuut, its also laced with random boring history lessons on ancient mesopotamia. There are just too many locations, characters and digressions to move the plot up coherently and keep in your head, and the flipping between protagonists is hard to follow and remember. Wikipedia's plot summary doesn't even mention several key points, like a nuclear fission powered guard dog nearly going critical. Some the jokes are dated references to the 1980's (Godfather's pizza, Moonies).
There is a good book in there, but wait for the miniseries in 2050.
A piece of art can simply not be your thing, but still be "good". That people whose taste you respect think something is great is reason to give it a shot -- but if you're not into it, you're not into it.
That's not wrong at all. It's just differing tastes. It doesn't mean that the work isn't good, nor does it mean that your taste is flawed.
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Likewise, I have “rage quit” reading other books in the past as well.
It’s solid advice. Don’t waste time reading something you are not enjoying. Same goes for movies.
Tried it second time. Went through those terrible 200 first pages... and suddenly I was on the 900th wishing hard it wasn't about to end. One of favourite books to this day.
I'm general, this is an online problem: how long do you want to persevere on any given book if it's not immediately gratifying? I often take into consideration whether I enjoyed other author's works and friends suggestions.
This method is pretty effective in a good discussion group because if you have explained your reasons well, people will understand your reasons for dislike and know whether things change; the payoff is worth it; the author improves; etc.
One example is The Licanius Trilogy. A lot of people say, "I read book 1, I hate it, should I finish it" and depending on how much they hated book 1 and their reading speed people will give differing advice. For example if you can finish the trilogy in 5 days (this is about how fast I read it) I would say yes, the ending is fantastic but the books are pretty dreadful in terms of prose quality and character depth. However if this will take you 6 months, no, bail out now and spend your time better. Read a plot summary on Wikipedia.
Reading is very much a social activity and much better when treated as such imo.
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... I don't know how I made it to #8.
The app isn’t for everyone, but if you are buried under the torrent of information you “think” you should read, I have found that Ephemera helps me focus and actually read more.
You can find the app here: https://deadpan.io/ephemera/
I’d love for Hacker News to check it out!
* Somehow, App Store SEO can't find it with "ephemera". "ephemera deadpan" found it though
* For me, personally, bookmarking is usually done on the computer and read elsewhere. Phone-only is restrictive
* Not a fan of paid unlock for basic features (setting expiration dates, accessing my own history (?!?)). I almost understand notifications if server costs are involved, like Apollo, but. While I understand devs gotta make a buck and this is both popular and well within your rights, I am not a fan of this trend
The important parts for me were:
* Don't assume you'll play everything or stress about "missing" games
* Easy visibility into what I'm currently playing, what I liked in the past, and what I've been thinking about playing next
* Try not to play more than 2 games concurrently. Then I end up never finishing anything, I appreciate the games I play less, and then I have less fun playing games overall.
Bonus points with this approach: Since I always have something I'm excited to play next, I'm never in a rush to buy games new. I actually save a fair amount of money because I'm almost always playing games a couple years old and on sale for 50%+ off.
This approach has been so successful and enjoyable for me I even thought about spinning this off into a product online but figured my weird OCD approach maybe isn't that generally applicable to other. Plus you can just create your own Airtable tailored to your own needs.
EDIT
If anyone wants to make their own list and wants some data to start, here's ~1000 games to start with my data with some of the more personal columns pruned out: https://www.dropbox.com/s/guc3tjefoyeyfvr/Games-Library-2023...
Most of the columns are self-explanatory. IGDB = is a games database run by Twitch (https://www.igdb.com/). I use the ID as basically a foreign key to their table and then I have scripts that query stuff in there like their critic's rating and release date programmatically.
Also if anyone knows of any other public data sets of video games and video game metadata please let me know!
I tend to play older games, and games I can pick up and play for five minutes at a time. Think Game Boy. A level here and a level there can feel like you've achieved way more than some longer, more grindy games.
I keep a couple of lists of games.
A massive "sounds interesting" list of games that I hear about along the way. I may never play some of them, but it sounded good at the time. Title and system is about all I put here. If I come back and don't remember what it was, it probably wasn't as interesting as I thought.
The other is list with WIP, started, and finished games.
If something slides into the started pile and I forget where I was, I just remove it. Life is too short to worry about things that are supposed to be fun.
In general I'm like this, but I also have games that are exclusions to the rule that I pop back around to from time to time, like the save I have in Factorio that I come back to and tinker with now and then (I keep a text file around with my general to-do list so I don't spend an hour running around the base trying to remember what the hell I was doing, while marveling at various bits of kludged together spaghetti)
As for books, I'm generally working through at least 3 at a time: One on audible, for commutes, one on my kindle, and one in print. I try to keep the kindle/print books varied so I switch between whichever strikes my fancy at the moment.
My previous strategy was to begin a game, that would be my main game, while sampling others on the side. If one of the side games caught my interest more, it would take the main game's place, and I might return to the original game later.
This approach was low-pressure, but it often took me years to complete many games.
I used to handle my side projects similarly, starting numerous projects but rarely bringing them to completion. Lately, I've been making an effort to stick with a side project long enough to at least show it to friends.
Now, I'm pushing myself to stay committed to two games at a time. One game is from top of my list that I really want to play. The other is a shorter one. This way I can enjoy that satisfying feeling of accomplishment more frequently.
I'd never considered making a spreadsheet for this, but now I'm intrigued by the idea!
I've been following the same approach, but also noticed that it's less effective at utilizing my excitement. Every project hits the point where sooner tedious work must be done and I've found myself sometimes stay away from it for a few weeks and not pick up something I'm excited about because I should really work on the tedious thing, so I work on neither.
I used Airtable to solve 3 problems:
1. With so many free games (Epic, GoG, PS+, Gamepass, etc), it's hard to know if/where I own a game 2. With so many owned games, it's hard to pick a thing to play. 3. Keeping track of what games I've played and how I felt about them. I do a big writeup of "my best media of the year" and it's hard to keep track of what I play.
Data wise, I also center everything on the IGDB ID, which gives me a lot of basic metadata. I also store Steam ID if available, because that's a more common foreign key. I've got a custom React extension that handles adding and fetching data. I've got tables for Games, Purchases, and Playthroughs, plus support for replay reasons and genre selection.
I recently did a big migration to add HLTB data, which I sure __thought__ was going to be simple and ended up being a big pain. I'm going to do a writeup for it once I find the time, because it did end up being interesting.
In terms of existing data, I found https://github.com/leinstay/steamdb very useful for collating information (though I had to shrink it a bit with `jq`- those are some pretty hefty JSON documents.
Here's my completed games list: https://airtable.com/shrJvjcnh0psf3ha6/tblF5D5k2qMuzrao8
I've got similar setups for books, movies, and TV shows. They're all linked on my site: https://xavd.id/#my-media-lists
I totally agree this is overkill for most people, but I've also found it super successful for increasing my enjoyment of videogames in an odd way. A bit part of that recently was recategorizing games from a 1-4 scale of interest level to a more human scale of "Play Next", "Play Soon", "Want to Play", "Play Eventually", "Would Like to Play", and "Won't Play". This lets me functionally hide games that I really don't intend to play (especially ones I just added to accounts for free). Narrowing my "Play Next" list down to about 15 games and restricting "Now Playing" to ~ 1 / platform __greatly__ reduces the cognitive overhead of a "backlog" and turns them into "a fun buffet of things I can do".
And wow storing them all as JSON that’s cool. I wish there was something with as much data as IGDB but you could download and access as easily as JSON files. Their API is really good but obviously has rate limits, etc.
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Most people aren't autodidacts... even elite atheletes have coaches.
I used to worry about adding items to my “want to read” list faster than I could read them. I realized that this is preferable to the opposite - having nothing to read. As long as I’m alive and want to read, I’ll be reading something. Having read all the books I want to is not my objective; enjoying reading books is. So, no need to worry about not having enough time to read all I want to.
I now treat my list as a pre-filtered pool of books that span various topics. There is no prioritization associated with them. I find it best to read next whichever book seems most relevant to my interests at the time, which I can’t anticipate in advance.
The other day my girlfriend sent me an article about microscopic gears in the legs of an insect and so I decided to read a book off my list about intelligent design. My prior read was about cardiovascular disease because I read an article about cholesterol on the internet. The one prior to that was about gender disparities, simply because I felt like it fit my frame of mind at the time.
There is no need to make the matter complicated: read what you want to read, when you want to read it.
But it needs to be said and repeated, right?
Because people feel time-poor when it comes to matching what they want to do against what they can do. Building up a backlog is probably the worst way to kill the fun there.
And if everyone in that scenario feels like they are somewhat alone in that feeling where the "Books I wish I had time to read" turns into a prioritization exercise where you end up reading the "most important book" while thinking of a book you aren't.
You and the OP are saying the same thing, but it is worth repeating.
The longer you've been out of a structured learning environment like a school/college the more sense that makes because that is a constrained environment where optimization actually helps & the fun reading part isn't.
As for me, my library holds list is a good way to have a "river of books" where I can dip out of it and let it pass through my bookshelf on a schedule whether I read it or not.
And yet you added even more with your comment :)
People are making trivial things unnecessarily complicated.
Unless and until you have a specific objective (eg. prepare/need for a job, go through a course etc.) all reading is cursory i.e. people are natural born dilettantes and flaneurs.
To return to information overload: this means treating your "to read" pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don't feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren't an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.
> 1) The initial belief that technology would help filter out irrelevant information and prevent overload has not come to fruition; instead, people are overwhelmed by content they genuinely want to read.
> 2) The problem lies in the fact that our filters are too successful, causing us to face a daily influx of interesting content (referred to as "haystack-sized piles of needles").
> 3) Many aspects of life also involve "too many needles," where we struggle to allocate our limited time and attention to numerous important tasks or interests.
> 4) Conventional productivity advice, which emphasizes efficiency, organization, and prioritization, falls short in addressing the challenge of having too many significant priorities.
> 5) The proposed solution is to treat the to-read pile as a river, selectively choosing items to engage with while accepting the inherent impossibility of clearing the entire backlog, thus leading to a more liberating and realistic approach to information overload.
The downside of doing the above is it's more generic and loses the punch of the prose. Always the main issue with skipping the reading to get to the meat. Obviously easier for non-fiction than fiction.
The paragraph you mention is the tangible advice, but articulating the problem is in my mind even more important than the advice itself.
Advice is just advice. Maybe it applies to you, maybe it doesn’t. The problem is what remains. The problem if well articulated either validates the advice, or gives the reader information to process for themselves and from which personal insight can be reached.
The advice without the problem is just some guy on the Internet telling you what to do, and that, to me, is rather uninteresting.
Perhaps there are many who have identified the problem without settling on a satisfying solution. In these cases the context is already (painfully) familiar and the main insight will be the path forward out of their malaise.
What you say is true for those who have never even grappled with the question, but I assume HN harbors folks who like to analyze inefficiencies in their lives, so I'd expect most of those here who already have reading lists to have contended with this problem and at least attempted to search for solutions in the past.
Edit: I get now. '...a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a choice item...'
In my own life, I have spent decades plagued by the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough, and I had many varied areas of focus and felt like I didn’t really progress on anything. That in itself (the feeling of lack of progress) was I think kind of misleading, as I did progress on some things (though I clearly regressed on some things as well).
I don’t really know how it happened but I have made some significant shifts in my life. I started to become physically active again, I stopped smoking cigarettes and some other unhealthy habits, I started really developing and digging into some of my active and creative passions like writing, playing a musical instrument, and renewing my focus on coding to an end and with purpose and quality in mind.
Somehow I started finding that I had much more energy and time available for everything. And as opportunities arose I began to seize them. It was a very exciting period for me. Eventually, my plate really became too full, and things began to suffer (mostly me) and I started to say no to things, and continue to keep my focus on what I really think is important. I feel that it has taught me about the interconnected nature of my life, and about how to value my time, how to slow down and appreciate something, how to deal with my emotions head on instead of taking years or decades to process events in my life (I am sure there have and will be many exceptions to what I have said), how to actively take stock of my current situation and change my plans as needed, how to deal with the fact that my expectations for things very rarely match up with reality, how to stop being an intellectual purist and idealist while still deeply valuing a good idea and pursuing my ideals. I look back at how much I have accomplished the last year and I can’t help thinking everything came from stopping trying to do everything and accomplishing nothing (or so it felt), and by embracing what really mattered to me when it was in front of me. I learned to float down the river, I guess. Lazily most of the time. But when I feel it is necessary, I can exert more power in changing my trajectory than ever I could before.